Notion drops usage limit on its personal free tier

iCrowd Newswire - May 20, 2020

Notion, a popular note-taking and wiki-creation app, revamped their personal pricing plans today stripping many of the user limitations from the free tier, bringing it on par with the functionality offered by the $5 per month paid plan of yore.

The company’s previous free tier had a fairly low usage limit (1,000 “blocks,” which are Notion’s content units) that ultimately kept users from doing anything too robust without paying up. By completely removing the limit on the amount of text and data you’re able to log, Notion is ensuring that most paid users can get everything they need from a free account.

They’re not completely abandoning premium-tier personal accounts; in fact, all existing paid customers are being transitioned to “Personal Pro” accounts at the same price they were paying before. The new plan, among other features, allows for file uploads larger than 5MB, unlimited guest collaborators and, most interestingly, upcoming access to a long-awaited Notion API that the company says is “coming soon, for real.” In September, Notion announced they were making the app free for students and teachers; now the company is rolling out access to the Personal Pro plan to these users as well.

Users that were tying multiple accounts to a single free account to manage some small shared database will be automatically transitioned to a free trial of the company’s teams product. Once they hit the 1,000 block limit, they’ll have to upgrade to the teams product or figure out a way to make the guest collaboration workflow on the free personal tier meet their needs.

Last month, Notion shared they had closed a new round of funding at a staggering $2 billion valuation. It certainly seems they’ve determined their future revenues will rely on expanding their teams product rather than monetizing individual users quite as aggressively. Like many workplace tools companies, Notion has relied somewhat on bottom-up scaling, so it’s likely they saw the opportunity of getting their platform in more users’ personal workflows and transitioning some of them to their teams products as a worthwhile long-term bet.